Archive forOctober, 2008

There’s a girl, Holly, probably about twenty-one, in my English Comp class, and she’s really, really masculine. In my head I’d been calling her a butch, because she’s tattooed and hole-punched within an inch of her life and wears mens’ clothing and swears every other word and smokes and is rude to the teacher. I told Dad about her with distaste.
But then the other day, she caught up to me after class and said, “So who’s that guy you meet up with after class? Is he your dad?” I said yeah. “Well, last week when you were leaving, I walked by and he turned his head and looked at me and shook it slowly.”
Oops.
So now I don’t call her butch in my head. I call her Holly. Dad doesn’t remember shaking his head at her, but it was wrong of me to think of her so negatively. Last night we had a test, and she appeared behind me as I was leaving and asked me how I thought I’d done. So we had a friendly conversation about it as we walked down the road. She, lighting up and smoking, dressed in droopy jeans and a skater hoodie and a flat black cap. Me, clutching my sewing, dressed in pink with a pretty scarf and my long hair around my face.
Which one of us is better? Certainly not me.